7 Legendary Acts of Petty Revenge

#3. Banning You from the Country

Let's face it: Divorce is a pain in the ass. You have to deal with paperwork, fees, lawyers and judges.

What if you want to make a clean break from your spouse without the hassle? An immigration officer in the United Kingdom devised the perfect solution. While his wife was visiting her family back in Pakistan, he logged into the immigration department's database and put her name on the country's Terror Watch List.

Photos.comOh, shit.

When his wife tried to return to the United Kingdom with her perfectly valid passport, she was surprised to be denied entry and forced to return to Pakistan. She was baffled because she had never been involved in any sort of criminal -- let alone terrorist -- activity, so she called her husband. Since he was an immigration officer, she figured that he would be the perfect person to take care of the misunderstanding. He told her that he would look into it and subsequently implemented that plan by having "the time of his life," according to an immigration source.

Getty"Honey, I can't just drop everything because of your problems. You know October is my busy time at work."

It wasn't until the man came up for a promotion three years later that his instant divorce formula was discovered. As he was being vetted for a promotion, his superiors noticed that his wife was a suspected terrorist, which tends to be the sort of thing that people notice when you work for the Immigration Department.

At that point, the immigration officer was left with somewhat of a dilemma: deny knowledge of the information and lose his job, or admit that he was responsible and ... lose his job. He admitted that he was indeed the one who put his wife's name on the list and was subsequently fired. According to unnamed officials, he has become a "bit of a legend in immigration circles" -- presumably for different reasons among women than men.

Photos.com"Relax baby, players gotta play."

#2. Making You a Sexual Deviant on Television

In 2005, CSI producer Sarah Goldfinger was looking to buy a house. Married real estate agents Scott and Melinda Tamkin represented the seller of a house that Goldfinger ended up making an offer on. The seller accepted the offer, but right before the close of escrow, Goldfinger pulled out of the deal when the building inspection revealed that extensive repairs were needed (thus there would be no place to put the moon laser we assume everyone named "Goldfinger" is required to own).

Five years later, the Tamkins were watching an episode of CSI when they noticed two characters named Scott and Melinda Tucker, a pair of shady real estate agents who were also into kinky sex. They also noticed that the name of the episode's producer, Sarah Goldfinger, sounded familiar. Remembering that they had been involved in a failed real estate deal with Goldfinger years earlier, Scott decided to get on the Internet and look up the episode.

That's when he noticed that several online descriptions of the episode actually listed the characters as Scott and Melinda Tamkin, not Tucker. He even came across the original casting call, which had these two character descriptions:

"[SCOTT TAMKIN] Mid to late-30s, this slick, attractive, hard-drinking extensive bondage/porn-watching man who's been a mortgage broker since college and feels his world drop out from under him during the mortgage crisis. His clients have left him and his own house may be foreclosed on. He is a suspect in his wife Melinda's murder."

"[MELINDA TAMKIN] Mid 30s, Scott's wife ... Melinda's death may have occurred during kinky sex in which she was handcuffed to the bed."

"Honey, why does the name 'Scott Tamkin' sound familiar to me?"

To add to his growing annoyance, Scott soon realized that an Internet search for his and his wife's names turned up several sites describing the "alternative" lifestyle of Scott and Melinda Tamkin. This couple was fictional, of course, but the Tamkins were furious. A good amount of their business came from Internet referrals, and they did not want to risk any possibility of mistaken association with murderous sexual deviants -- although there probably is a real estate market for that.

Photos.com"You were right, son -- that house is fucking hot."

They filed a lawsuit, but Goldfinger denied the charges, claiming that she had used their real names only as a "placeholder" during the writing process and that the casting calls and script were accidentally leaked before she could change the names. Ultimately, the case was dismissed on the grounds that the fictional Tamkins could not be linked conclusively to the real-life Tamkins and, thus, Goldfinger was protected by her First Amendment rights.

#1. Turning Your House into a Cemetery

As the Quartermaster General for the Continental Army during the Civil War, Montgomery Cunningham Meigs was responsible for transporting troops and maintaining supply lines for the entire army.

Meigs was also a hardcore Unionist. Even though he was originally from Georgia, he despised any officers who resigned from the U.S. Army to serve in the Confederate Army. One such officer was Colonel Robert E. Lee, who left behind a prestigious 35-year military career to fight for the South and (in case you slept your way through 12 years of grade school) eventually became the Commanding General of the entire Confederate Army.

At the time of his defection, Lee and his wife lived in a mansion called Arlington House, located on a 1,100-acre estate in Virginia. Lee told his wife to flee, which was somewhat of a wise move, because the land was overrun by Union forces less than a month later. Citing failure to pay taxes, the government eventually seized the estate which we assume Lee had left filled with Home Alone-style boobie traps.

And the plan worked. Not wanting to stir up further animosity with the government -- and presumably hoping to avoid angry Union zombies -- Lee never challenged for the return of his land.

Getty"That's OK. You guys can keep it."

It wasn't until 1870 that Lee's son, George Washington Curtis Lee, successfully sued for the return of the estate, immediately selling it back to the government for $150,000 (or around $3.5 million in today's dollars). The Arlington House has since been restored and is now considered a historic building. Meanwhile, the 300,000 gravestones dotting the grounds of what is now Arlington National Cemetery will forever represent the giant, corpse-filled middle finger of Quartermaster General Meigs.

Check out Dennis' musings on human behavior here. Or cringe and laugh at some bad metaphors here.

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